Phil Van Trump
The Meredian Pilot Plant has been operating at full gear
producing Meredian PHA for customer trials and
validation! These materials in fact have already been
used at a recent customer trial at Dart for a key project
and are moving us ever closer to commercial validation
with our partners.
have surge capacity in the long term as we continue to
grow. After the fermentation broth arrives at our facility
we use our proprietary process noted in last month’s
article to extract, purify, and dry the product for
customer use.
Our facility has been producing approximately 400
pounds per week of PHA, as we complete our
improvements this capacity will continue to rise up to
3000 pounds per week when the 20,000 Liter vessel
comes online! In fact, we will be the largest North
American producer of PHA when this vessel comes
online which we will be very proud of!
Meredian launched a key relationship with Tate and
Lyle, a contract fermentation provider, in order to
provide fermentation vessels for us while we are
executing on our plan to bring our new 20,000 Liter
vessel online. This relationship has allowed us to
accelerate our customer development cycle, provide
external validation of our process, and enable us to
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MEREDIAN, INC. NEWSLETTER JUNE 2014
JUNE 2014 NEWSLETTER
MEREDIAN, INC. NEWSLETTER JUNE 2014
Sean Schuyler
The fields of gold have been harvested. The first truck arrived
on May 13th and within two weeks, more than 850,000 pounds of
locally grown canola was unloaded and stored in three tanks on
site at the Agroreco facility (previously Propex). This is exciting
news for local agriculture. Despite less than desirable weather
conditions, yields in some areas were over 43 bushels per acre.
A portion of this seed will be utilized to plant next year’s crop
with the balance being crushed and used to support our research
and development efforts.
In anticipation of the harvest, the Meredian team worked
diligently to be ready. The mechanical team headed up by Don
Paul installed an unloading system and modified three of the
eight silos on site at the new Agrocrush operation. With the
help of teammates Tony Miller and Dennis Logue, the unload
system could process each truck in about an hour. Plant
manager Sean Schuyler was tasked with sampling and testing the
seed as it was unloaded. The first challenge was to obtain the
correct equipment along with some grading guidelines and
instruction.
USDA Certified scales and seed analysis equipment (GAC2500)
were used to check and verify that the moisture content of the
harvest was lower than 10% (most was around 7%). The locally
grown canola was healthy and undamaged. Thankfully, there
was very little farm debris in the samples. We took about a
pound of seed sample from each load, which processed in about
an hour. All samples were retained for further data analysis.
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We received helpful insight and encouragement from
Greg Calhoun and his daughter Lacey, who walked Sean
through the process ahead of deliveries and answered
vital questions about the processing of the test samples.
Additionally, Kathy Hornsby, the licensed weigher, was
helpful in processing the paperwork associated with
each load. Grading was assisted by Ben Holden and
Abbey Smith. Their young eyes and steady hands were
useful in this process.
Next year we expect to receive about 700 truckloads of
seed. With the harvest expected to last about 2 weeks
we will receive a truck every 15-20 minutes. The unload
system and quality checks will need to occur in minutes.
The first full sized Crush line is scheduled to be installed
April 2015.
It is exciting to see the benefits of local agriculture
partnering with local manufacturing.
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The next challenge involved storing the seed in a climate controlled environment so as to prevent the seed from getting
moldy in the South Georgia humidity. A series of fans and sensors were installed to circulate air through the silos. A
portable grain temperature detection indicator allows our operators to check the tanks and confirm temperatures in
eight zones. The portable indicator is plugged into a data port which is monitored and analyzed to ensure that an
acceptable storage environment is maintained.
MEREDIAN, INC. NEWSLETTER JUNE 2014
Michael Smith
The build-out of the first reactor has begun! The
engineers are busy and the construction workers are
being scheduled:
While this work is progressing with the outside team,
the Meredian team has begun ordering the long leadtime items like gearboxes, sensors and dryers to be able
to meet the commissioning date of December 20, 2014.
The next two months will be spent ordering equipment
and setting the construction schedule with no
significant visual changes to the building or equipment;
however, by mid-summer the plant will be full with
teams of contractors. While 8 months to complete the
facility may seem like a long time to some people it is
actually a very aggressive construction schedule.
The engineers are incorporating the learnings from our
fermentation runs at Tate & Lyle into the plant design.
These changes to the original design reflect advances
made in the last three months to the manufacturing
process that have resulted in higher yields. The
engineering team will also be converting these design
drawings into shop drawings used by welders and
fabricators to assemble the pieces into a functional
plant.
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Moving customers into larger facilities is necessary as
Meredian’s current facility, even at the eventual fullsize volume of 60 million pounds per year, is too small
for some of our customer’s product lines. The amount
of polymer needed for one product can range from a
few millions pounds per year to over 2 billion. As you
can see the growth will not happen in the current plant
but will be started here and moved to additional sites
as soon as possible.
With the beginning of the build-out we are transitioning
into a very exciting time from producing samples to
providing commercial production.
Blake Lindsey
The DaniMer team has remained focused on the
continued efforts to complete all the requirements of
the Henkel quality protocols. These efforts will allow us
to progress toward pre commercial trials with several
large brand owners. As you may recall, the renewable
hot melt adhesive we have developed at DaniMer is the
world’s first. Henkel is expected to partner with
DaniMer following our development activities and
launch the product using the vast sales resources of the
Henkel team worldwide. Today, Henkel has the majority
share of the global adhesive market and growth
opportunities are difficult for them because they
control at present such a dominant position. However,
brand owners and Henkel customers are seeking
options to be more “sustainable" in all of their
packaging needs including adhesives. DaniMer has
successfully invented a renewable hot melt adhesive
that works well in a range of applications including the
high volume segment of case & carton sealing. Products
you every day such as cereal boxes, diaper boxes, soap,
etc. utilize adhesives that are produced from
petroleum. The adhesives we use today are not
renewable and are difficult to recycle.
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After commissioning of this first vessel, Meredian will
have a capacity of 6mm pounds of finished product per
year. We will use the production from this first
fermenter to begin taking customers through the
incubation cycle to full commercialization. It is at this
time we will begin to explore options for the customers
to build their own facilities or expand into the new
1mm square foot facility recently acquired by a partner
/ investor on Meredian’s behalf.
MEREDIAN, INC. NEWSLETTER JUNE 2014
DaniMer offers an alternative that meets the
adhesive quality needs and is price
competitive testing was conducted this week
in Bridgewater, NJ and additional tests will
follow next week. Our immediate goal is to
enable Henkel to complete all laboratory
testing as soon as possible and enter the next
phase which is field trials with customers
such as Hershey and General Mills. We look
forward to reporting our progress toward
that goal in the next monthly newsletter.
We continue to see growth in our injection
molding resins for the single serve coffee
pods and in our pet treat business. The
production teams at DaniMer have enabled
our customers to gain new business by
offering a very consistent, quality product.
At Meredian, the demand for PHA continues to grow and our customer partners are excited about the future potential
use of these materials. We have active R&D efforts underway utilizing our Pilot plant's output of PHA where applications
have been targeted for thermoformed materials (drink cup lids), flexible films (food storage bags, diaper backing films
and agri-mulch), foam (food service articles like foam cups, trays, containers to replace polystyrene) and injection
molding (disposable items such as razor handles) to aqueous solutions where water and grease resistance can be
enabled for paper or fiber based materials. With the Pilot plants ability to provide regular weekly production output of
PHA, our R&D teams are now positioned to respond promptly to our customer needs for samples to demonstrate the
materials actual capabilities for the targeted applications.
Scan to learn more about Meredian
Explore our website at www.meredianinc.com filled with insightful resources
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